British Politics and Policy

The omnipresent slogan at the Conservative party conference, ‘for hardworking people’, reflects the belief that hard work is the proper way of living one’s life and the route to economic success. The rhetoric of George Osborne and his colleagues around hardworking people is not new but it remains regressive in its effects, not least in ignoring the real hardships faced by those who work hard for a living. David Spencer argues that there are other areas of life that matter to our well-being and allowing work to dominate us can only lead to harm.

This year’s Conservative Party conference has reminded us incessantly that George Osborne and his fellow ministers are “for hardworking people”. This same slogan has also become popular among Labour politicians – indeed support for “hardworking people” has replaced support for the working class. The broader use (and overuse) of this slogan by politicians reflects a deeper belief that hard work is the proper way of living one’s life. Working hard is the way one gets on in life. No matter that real wages have fallen in recent years, work is promoted as the route to economic success.

Thinking beyond capitalism? Don’t bet on it(Credit: M. Holland)

Negatively, the benefits of hard work are contrasted with the evils of idleness. The “idle poor” are the ideological counterpoint to hardworking people. This inevitably feeds hostility towards those on benefits and leads to support for draconian measures to force the poor and jobless into work even when jobs are in short supply. But this obsession with hard work as the route to economic success and moral redemption has proved a dangerous distraction in several ways. Working hard to earn a living need not be seen as a good thing if it means enduring long hours of drudgery, long hours away from one’s family and friends, or undertaking several low paid jobs with no security of employment. We lose sight of, and indeed deny, the costs of wage labour by eulogising hard work.

History shows that capitalism brought about an increasing focus on the virtues of hard work. Life in pre-capitalist times was more leisurely and less pressurised; people worked much more irregularly and enjoyed extended periods of free time. It is essentially with the rise of capitalism that the work ethic has become idolised and lauded. The rhetoric of George Osborne and his colleagues around hardworking people is not new but it remains regressive in its effects, not least in ignoring the real hardships faced by those who work hard for a living.

The dream in the past was that capitalism would bring about a reduction in work hours. Keynes famously looked forward to the day when we would work only 15 hours per week. He thought that rising levels of affluence would lead to a shorter working week and to the liberation of humanity from hard work. History has proved Keynes wrong as workers have continued to face relatively long hours at work, and the prospects for shorter work hours any time in the future look bleak indeed. In fact, with the squeeze on real wages, the likelihood is that many more workers will be forced to work longer just to make ends meets.

But there is a sense in which we could live better lives by working less. Firstly, shorter working hours would provide a means to spread work more evenly in society thereby combating the twin problems of unemployment and overwork. Secondly, working fewer hours would free up more time for people to pursue activities outside of work and thus to realise their creative capacities in other ways. Thirdly, working less would help to combat the stress and burnout associated with long and intense working hours.

Working hard, to be sure, can be rewarding. We can gain intrinsic reward by doing work well on a continuous and intensive basis. Work that matches with our needs, creative and material, can be uplifting. But work has its place. There are other areas of life that matter to our well-being and allowing work to dominate us can only lead to harm. In essence, the struggle against the ideology of hard work is about the struggle to overcome an economic and political logic that forces us to work longer and harder than we would otherwise. Working less thus ultimately requires us to think beyond capitalism. George Osborne to think beyond capitalism? Don’t bet on it.

Note: This article gives the views of theauthor, and not the position of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting.

About the Author

David Spenceris Professor of Economics and Political Economy at the Leeds University Business School.
This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

What’s your view on the French 35 hour law introduced by Martine Aubry back in 2000? The broad aim of the legislation was precisely related to your point: “shorter working hours would provide a means to spread work more evenly in society thereby combating the twin problems of unemployment and overwork”.

The policy is now regarded as a failure: unemployment did not fall and french workers would not agree there was an improvement in quality of life.

I was living & working in france at the time the 35 hour week was adopted and have my own views.

I’m still left wondering if it is possible at all to reduce working hours for those following traditional employment and employed statuses.

Surely company owners, directors etc. will always advocate hard work and long hours as this devalues the work itself and makes it easier for employers to pay less for more?

My view is the Conservative slogan: “for hardworking people” is the slogan of the factory owner – not the worker.

I think with job sharing and the appropriate use of technology work hours could be cut even in ‘traditional’ jobs.

From an employer perspective, shorter work hours could deliver cost savings in the form of higher productivity. I suspect that one reason why employers are reluctant to cut work hours is because of their short-termist outlook. That is where the law becomes important in regulating work time. There are of course other constraints on shorter working time linked to employer power and consumerism.

I have just finished a book about the history of shorter working hours in the USA that readers of Spencer’s excellent article may find interesting. Here is a “blurb” from the book’s jacket:

Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream
by Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt

Has the “American Dream” become an unrealistic utopian fantasy, or have we simply forgotten what we were dreaming about? In our frantic pursuit of JOBS, JOBS, JOBS, have we forgotten what we are working for? In his topical book, Free Time, Hunnicutt examines the way that progress, once defined as more of the good things in life AS WELL AS more free time to enjoy them, has come to be understood only as economic growth and more work, forevermore.

Hunnicutt provides an incisive intellectual, cultural, and political history of the original “American Dream” from the colonial days to the present. Taking his cue from Walt Whitman’s “Higher Progress,” he follows the traces of that dream, cataloging the many voices that prepared for and lived into an opening “realm of freedom,” filled with a myriad of diverse, extra-economic goods, activities, and possibilities.

Free Time seeks to remind Americans of the forgotten, best part of the “American Dream”—that more and more of our lives might be lived freely, with an enriching family life, with more time to enjoy nature, friendship, and the adventures of the mind and of the spirit—thus offering a realistic and inspiring alternative to the failing projects, work and wealth without end.

That article was hard work. You should have stopped half way through and let someone else finish it. This would have given you time to persue more leisure pursuits like the half starving peasants of pre-industrial UK. Let’s face it they were so happy but decided to give it all up to work in awful cotton mills. If you stopped half way through the other person could have got half your wages or do you think the article deserved twice the pay for it? This article is hard work because there are so many flaws in its logic.The poor are idle because of welfare trap, government subsidies, and awful education system. For example, why don’t you discuss basic income as a solution rather than tell people what they can’t do, offer solutions to what they can do. Poor people can work very hard if they want and it is worth their while.

I have to say that I disagree with your ‘worth your while’ notion.
Up until 2010 I worked full time for a leading electronic company. The company makes around £30mil + profits a year. Despite being intrinsic to its success, I struggled to make £16k.
I joined the company in 2003 and worked hard to make my department operate to its full potential. I created a lot of the profit for the company as my department worked and still is on the front line of the business. Despite senior managers receiving lavish salaries and bonuses, my staff and I were left struggling on wages that barely eclipsed minimum wage. We worked extra hours for no pay and we contributed greatly to company profits.
In 2010 I decided to take on a second role which utilised my copywriting skills to make ends meet. This was driven out of necessity.
The idea of working hard and progressing in a corporate company is laughable. To get ahead, it is a question of bravado, stitching up the innocent, and being an opportunist. Knowing your job, being productive, working hard is second best at best.
I do not like to make assumptions as I know little about you. But I do know that the idea of working hard yields its own rewards is nothing but capitalist propaganda.
Apologies if I hijacked a post which in the main, in my opinion, raises some good points.

Richard I think you made your point more succinctly. The article doesn’t define what hard work is. I think many CEO’s etc are grossly overpaid, I think the wall street obsession with quarterly results like Bill George said, is running the working environment. When a group of people are in powerful positions in an organisation they can distort and manipulate information. The value of workers versus senior management is arbitrary. I knew a road sweeper who worked “very hard” physically every day. The value of his work was not appreciated. That is just reality unfortunately. The senior managers who have got there by luck, backstabbing, good education, intelligence, whatever, value their own hard work and they are in a position to ensure they get paid for it.

The premise of the article is misplaced as is political usage of hard work is. Hard work is many things. Living on welfare is hard work. The world is changing. If you aren’t valued from your hard work then don’t stay where you are. Loyalty to organizations is the biggest mistake people make. I don’t understand it. If a message has to go out to people it’s be loyal to yourself not organisations. Use organisations as they would use you.

Giving people more time off is not going to get you anywhere. In the history of the world, the last fifty years have been unprecedented for workers rights etc. If you want to be successful then the only way there is “hard work” and luck. A lot of people are satisfied with basic needs of living a peaceful life and that is fine.

It’s late and I’m starting to ramble. To conclude. I think forcing people to work only a certain number of hours is ludicrous, everyone is different, some want to work more some less. The person that works more imo deserves more reward than the latter. Good luck with your career.

The idea that workers who are unhappy, exploited, etc. are foolish to remain with their current employer is so out of touch, I can’t help wondering if you work for a living, or are perhaps retired? These days there really ARE no jobs to make a lateral or upward move to. If you don’t like your crummy job, you’re told — and it’s true! — that there are plenty of others out there ready to take it, and good luck finding anything comparable. So many of the available jobs are service positions, paying the lowest wage possible, with very little to no hope of advancement. These jobs often require one to work very hard, again giving the lie to the work hard > you’ll succeed mantra we’ve had pounded into us since Horatio Alger showed America how it’s done. The alternative, of course, if one is determined to find work that resembles something one is interested in and has an aptitude for, is the unpaid internship.

[…] work can always set us giveaway and yield us with a basement for a good life. As I have created elsewhere, this mythologizing about work fails to confront – indeed it actively conceals – the strident […]

“Working hard to earn a living need not be seen as a good thing if it means enduring long hours of drudgery, long hours away from one’s family and friends”

Just to qualify this briefly, don’t we really mean work that one doesn’t enjoy? Work that one does not want to do? Which covers 80% of people, at least. Oftentimes if you’re passionate about what you do, it’s the very endurance of those long hours of drudgery and being away from loved ones that can, perversely, be so rewarding and thrilling in the long run.

Forgive the somewhat obtuce example, but there isn’t a single elite athlete or high level, professional musician who would agree with you about the misplaced importance on hard work. At a small recital one evening a lady from the audience went over to Yo Yo Ma, awestruck and shaking she was so impressed, and said, “I would give my life to play the cello like you”. Yo Yo Ma replied, “….well….I did….”

I agree with your point about the problem being work that one doesn’t enjoy but think your Yo Yo Ma example is a little misleading. As someone who almost went into professional music, I can tell you that one can enjoy playing music and constantly bringing one’s skills to a high level but despise the harried schedules and overinflated expectations that suck the joy out of being a musician. Moreover, the sacrifices that Yo Yo Ma made is a not an essential component of being a musician but being one in an increasingly winner-take-all market. The music market used to support a larger number of moderately talented and elite musicians (but likely not as elite as Ma). With fewer positions there’s greater competition. One must work increasingly harder to get a position, of which there are increasingly fewer even though they pay increasingly more. Those who lose out now more typically do not receive a more moderate wage and position but rather often nothing at all and have mostly wasted (in an economic sense too) years of labor in attempting to win in the market. The world that David Spenser, and others, are suggesting would instead have little room for winner-take-all markets and Yo Yo Ma’s but more people able to make more modest livings out of more modest musical talents (and the more modest amount of work necessary).

Late stage capitalism holds the promise that many people could work less while having enough money to live comfortably. After all, there is plenty of money, it just isn’t distributed terribly well. If it were distributed properly, most people would have enough, and the pathologically greedy who currently have so much of our global currency lying idle in tax havens — trillions — could still have far more than they could ever spend. We would have to move away from worshipping the false god of hard work, and the damaging practice of allowing a few people control obscene amounts of wealth, and move towards the idea that machines are doing so much that not all people need to work to make the world go round.